1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a swallowing function evaluating apparatus, and in particular a swallowing function evaluating apparatus capable of quantitatively evaluating a swallowing function safely and repeatedly.
2. Related Art
In recent years, a swallowing disorder appearing in a patient suffering from muscular dystrophy or myasthenia has also attracted considerable attention as a disease caused by weak muscular strength due to aging. This suggests that the next aging society will cause patients suffering from the swallowing disorder to increase. In general, for example, a video fluorography (VF (Video Fluorography)) examination for swallowing, a method of examining the movement of a throat by touch, or a drink test is used to diagnose the swallowing disorder.
In the video fluorography (VF) examination for swallowing, the swallowing disorder of an examinee is diagnosed by letting the examinee drink liquid containing a contrast medium and continuously radiating X-rays onto the front and side of the throat of the examinee to capture the image of the swallowing motion of the examinee (for example, see Non-Patent Document 1). This method enables to see the image of the inside of the larynx and thus improve the accuracy of diagnosis. In the examination by touch, needless to say, the doctor touches a patient on body by hand and diagnoses the disease. The drink test is a diagnostic method of letting an examinee drink water and observing the swallowing motion with naked eyes at the time from the outside. The examination by touch and the drink test can be easily performed. A monitoring apparatus has been used to detect the displacement of the body of a sleeping examinee in the height direction (the displacement of the abdomen), not the movement of the throat, and the monitoring apparatus includes an illumination pattern emitting unit that emits a predetermined illumination pattern (bright spot) to the sleeping examinee, an image capturing device that continuously captures the image of the light with wave length emitted, and a shift calculating unit that calculates the shift of the illumination pattern between two frames of images captured by the image capturing device at different times (for example, see Patent Document 1).
[Patent Document 1] JP-A-2002-175582
[Non-Patent Document 1] ‘The Japanese Journal of Dysphagia Rehabilitation’, Volume 8, Number 1, pp. 71-86, 2004
However, in the video fluorography (VF) examination, X-rays are continuously radiated to a body of the examinee to be examined, and thus it is necessary to pay special attention to exposure to radiation, and it is not allowed to repeatedly perform the video fluorography (VF) examination on the same person. On the other hand, in the examination by touch and the drink test, since diagnosis is mainly performed by examining the appearance of the examinee, the diagnosis result generally depends on the subjectivity of the doctor, which makes it difficult to get quantitative evaluation.
The invention has been made to solve the above-mentioned problems, and it is an object of the invention to provide a swallowing function evaluating apparatus capable of quantitatively evaluating a swallowing function safely and repeatedly.